January 10/08 11:58 am - Cycling News from Around the World

Nicole Cooke yesterday hailed the formation of an entirely British professional team as "the biggest step forward in women's sport in this country for many, many years".

Twice a winner of the women's Tour de France and one of Britain's brightest hopes for Olympic success in Beijing this summer, Welsh ace Cooke heads a squad of 10 women and two men who will ride a full season of events under the new team colours.

The 2008 UCI ProTour begins at the Tour Down Under in Australia on January 22 but Cycling Weekly have discovered that most of the big names in the peloton have snubbed the race, preferring to train in Europe and follow a traditional early season build-up.

German cycling's biggest name, sprinter-cum-Classics specialist Erik Zabel has announced during the Milram team presentation on Thursday that he plans to end his career after the 2008 season. However, he left open the final decision until the end of the year.Read the entire article at Cycling Weekly

Major investment needed to get schools cycling

It will take Ã‚Â£250 million of investment over four years to get cycling fully established in schools, according to Cycling England's funding strategy for National Investment in Cycling to 2012.

Phillip Darnton, Cycling England chair, says in Cycling Weekly's Schools Cycling series today (Thursday), that there are many positive cycling promotion initiatives but "it's the scale of it that needs addressing."

Cycling England was formed in 2005 by the Department for Transport and charged "to get more people cycling". Read the entire article at Cycling Weekly

New Zealand's Rosara Joseph going for two Olympic spots

With her juggling act, Rosara Joseph would have few problems earning a living in the circus.

The Christchurch cyclist has endured one of her toughest 12 months mixing a masters degree at Oxford University with a double campaign of mountainbiking and road cycling.

Joseph is hopeful of adding an Olympic Games berth into the mix - in two disciplines.

She won silver on a mountainbike at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006 and has now added road cycling to her repertoire.

With a starting spot in this weekend's national road cycling championships near Napier she will have the opportunity to show New Zealand selectors she is just as serious about an Olympic bid on the tarmac as she is in cross-country mountainbiking.

Austrian authorities are investigating a Vienna-based laboratory that the World Anti-Doping Agency suspects of supplying so-called "dry blood" to athletes for doping purposes, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The reason they're moving on? After 25 years of putting on the triathlon, the key volunteers -- most of whom had been around from the beginning - had simply grown more tired than the race participants.Read the entire article at Yakima Herald

VeloTones - Ringtones for the Mobile Cycling Computer

Cyclists routinely rely on bike computers to determine their spot speed and maintain average speed at a certain pace. However, constantly looking at a computer display is not practical and could be dangerous while cycling. VeloTones (TM), like ringtones or truetones, are MP3 sounds for mobile devices like cell phone or PDA. They allow cyclists to determine speed without the need to look at the display.

SoundOfMotion, creator of the first bluetooth bicycle computer for mobile devices, introduces VeloTones (TM) for audible monitoring of cyclists speed and acceleration.Read the entire article at PRweb

Clif Bar wine blazes new trail

What could be the next step for an active couple creating food for people on the go? For Clif Bar founders Gary Erickson and his wife Kit Crawford it was producing a wine good enough to make you want to slow down.

Clif Bar & Company, the makers of Clif Bar, Luna Bar, and other conveniently packaged organic products, started in 1992 with a passion for family, food and adventure. Erickson and Crawford say this passion also extends to other aspects of their life - like good wine.

Besides the benefits to your health, commuting to work by bicycle can also make you feel guiltless about carbon emissions and allow you to fret a bit less as the price of gas creeps inexorably toward $4 a gallon.

But the most important benefit to riding your bicycle to work is far more simple -- it's fun. It's more than fun, it's addictive.

NSW spends less per person on cycling than any other state, resulting in cycleways that were poorly planned and often dangerous, bike lobby groups warned yesterday as the Government denied that under-used bicycle lanes were a waste of money.

The motoring group NRMA has accused the Iemma Government of wasting millions of dollars on building cycleways that attract few cyclists, including a new bicycle lane on the choked Epping Road, which the NRMA says will in effect cost $300,000 for every cyclist who uses it.

A $60 million cycleway was also built next to the Westlink M7, but cycling groups say it is barely used because of its location.

In an ongoing effort to raise awareness and support for free services and programs that help people affected by cancer, Amgen today announced television and film actor Patrick Dempsey appears in a public service announcement supporting the Breakaway from CancerÃ‹â„¢ initiative.

Amgen created Breakaway from Cancer in 2005 as a complementary component to its sponsorship of the Amgen Tour of California, an annual world-class cycling event that takes place in February. Designed to help empower people affected by cancer, the Breakaway from Cancer initiative supports the services of two nonprofit organizations Ã‹â€ The Wellness Community (TWC), an international, non-profit organization dedicated to providing free support, education and hope to people affected by cancer, and National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), the oldest survivor-led cancer advocacy organization in the country. Now in its third year, the Breakaway from Cancer initiative continues to help those touched by cancer take an active role in their recovery and find the tools they need to live well with Ã‹â€ and beyond Ã‹â€ the disease.

Why are we so disliked? It's not just that people seem to find cyclists mildly annoying or disagreeable, but they actually hate us. Think I'm exaggerating? Tell me if you can think of any another social group about whom a newspaper columnist would feel entitled - in jest or otherwise - to say its members should be summarily executed. In a broadsheet, even paedophiles might get a grudging acknowledgement of a right to due process of law.

The murderous proposal was made by Matthew Parris in the Times. In a now notorious post-Christmas piece, he expressed his fury at cyclists who ride two or three abreast, toss their litter of energy bar wrappers and drinks bottles into hedgerows and are foully abusive if challenged.Read the entire article at Guardian Unlimited

On December 27th, 2007 Times columnist Mathew Parris published the following article ...

"A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists. ItÃ¢â‚¬Å¡s not just the Lycra, though Heaven knows this atrocity alone should be a capital offence; nor the helmets, though these ludicrous items of headgear are designed to protect the only part of a cyclist that is not usefully employed; nor the self-righteousness, though a small band of sports cyclists on winterÃ¢â‚¬Å¡s morning emits more of that than a cathedral at evensong; nor even the brutish disregard for all other road users, though the lynching of a cyclist by a mob of mothers with pushchairs would be a joy to witness."